Have you lived in eternity?
Revelled in it?
The thin pale veil
Of Belief and Meaning,
God’s Love, your everlasting soul,
Fluttering before your eyes,
Though you are not sure
what tethers it to you?
Have you ever wondered whether
A gentle breeze would be enough
To blow it all
Into the pale blue sky?
Have you lost eternity?
Has your familiar universe
Turned strange to you in an instant–
Vast, unknowable, and indifferent–
Your soul and God’s Love stripped away,
Time suddenly constricting you,
Eternity closed off to you,
And all of this happening
For no discernible reason?
Has panic tickled your ears and neck,
Heaved your guts,
Clenched your breaths,
When you think about death
And try to imagine non-existence?
—
Why am I so afraid of death?
I don’t know, ask
My grandmother who died from cancer,
Who wept on her last Christmas and
Whose eyes betrayed uncertainty
In the final days when Father Albert came
To administer her last rites.
Ask the chipmunk my cat paralyzed,
Who hid under my car and could not stop
The eyes rolling in its head, the breaths,
Shallow and fast, that heaved its chest,
The unmistakable signs
Of panic and fear
That recurred in my nightmares.
Ask anyone afraid of anything unknown, or
Do some thinking on your own;
Fear is not hard to imagine.
